July 2013

VOL XXI, Issue 7, Number 243

Editor: Klaus J. Gerken

European Editor: Mois Benarroch

Contributing Editors: Michael Collings; Jack R. Wesdorp; Heather Ferguson

Previous Associate Editors: Igal Koshevoy; Evan Light; Pedro Sena; ; Oswald Le Winter

ISSN 1480-6401

Introduction

Patrick White

EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING

Contents

Joan McNerney

Rendezvous

Scarves

Invitation

Birthday Present

A.J. Huffman

In Butterflied Dance

Old McDonald’s Algorithm

With Mental

Dream Weaver

John W. Sexton

With Every Atom

Eternity is Never Done

Face of Bloody Ruby

Loose Floorboard

Martin Burke

RUT TRACKS

Roman James Hoffmann

The Lord of the Desert

He Sees the Name

A photo

The Sun behind the smog

Tasting the Wasted (To Those that Beat God)

Carolyn Gregory

STAR UNDER STROBES

CABIN FRAMED IN ICE

AMONG FLOWERS

CHIHULY (for the False and the Real)

RETRO POLITICS

THE BLUE DRESS

ENDANGERED

Post Scriptum

Patrick White

POETRY USED TO LIVE IN A FORBIDDEN STATE OF COURAGEOUS GRACE

Patrick White

EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING

Even when the road is missing

like the absence of God, or a woman I love,

I praise that emptiness for the freedom it accords me

to create a way of my own like a river of stars

and for the universe it’s left me

like a travelling companion I couldn’t improve upon.

The gate shut, the door closed, the window locked,

I slip a key to a poem under the welcome mat

and say my house is your house anytime you call

and then go get drunk with the moon down by the lake.

And after awhile we’re laughing at ourselves,

rolling in the leaves like the groundswell

of two happy vagrants with homeless hearts

making off with our lives for free as if

we’d just pulled off some cosmic B and E.

without leaving any sign of culpability behind,

except for the joy of our felicitous crime.

And when my moonboat’s in port for repairs

like bedsheets in a backyard fleet of laundry on the line,

I don’t mind being land locked for awhile.

I just take a walk along the shore of the lake

and gather moonlit feathers

from the scales of the waves

that have evolved from raptors into swans,

and binding them together

like Daedalus did for Icarus,

take a joy ride into the sun at midnight

not really caring too much about whether

I’m at zenith or nadir as long

as I’m transiting something akin to a threshold.

The sun can hold Venus on a short leash,

and me on the chain of my spine

like a barnyard dog barking at wolves

trying to tempt it deeper into the night

but the last crescent of the moon

will cut right through them both

like the umbilical cords of a new life

where we can both roam free

like rogue planets from star to star.

Empty-handed and full-hearted I come by day

to a low place looking for fire

from the daylilies with a bucket and an urn,

because I’m so tired of what I’ve had to do

to stay alive for the past fifty years as a serf of poetry

to keep it a calling, instead of a career,

and suffer the consequences of not attending to it

as a business that makes a profit off the stars,

but by night I’m a starling of creosote in a chimney

singing my heart out as if I wanted to eat it

because it has all the virtues of a noble enemy

and there’s no poetry or protein in the junkfood of fame,

though I think that might be a trifle ingenuous.

Impoverished Druid, you lean on a crutch for a tree,

as a flying buttress to your sacred folly,

and running out of time to avoid

a head-on collision with eternity

all your devotions the ghosts of yesterday,

you kick the stool from out under your feet

and garotte yourself from the bough of an oak,

like the berry of a single moon of mistletoe

and the last crescent of a golden sickle just out of reach

of the harvest season of the King of the Waxing Year.

Poor heart, what a battered shoe

of a vital organ you’ve become, a bone box

for the sacred skeletons of hummingbirds and elephants,

a Burgess Shale for the creative fossils and footprints

we both had to evolve through to come to this

inconceivable moment without a time scale

to measure how far it is from then to now

like the last leap of faith of the waterclock of life

into the abyss without a bucket for a safety net

or any deep assurance of even having a bottom anymore

to fall out of the ongoing over the edge of a precipice

as if even the rivers of Eden sometimes

had to seek release from it all and fall

even without a parachute to candle

like an exclamation mark all the way down,

a descent into hell creatively much to be preferred

than stagnating in paradise with nothing but apples to eat.

But still you know you won’t do it, given

the number of times now I’ve come running

with a chair and a rope to let you down

out of the window of a burning building

not knowing whether we were committing suicide

or I was running to your rescue as I always have.

Your daring has always said feathers and falling

has always taken wing like Pegasus before,

and what a wild strange radiant white water ride it’s been

across the high unbounded starfields of the shining

with Vega and Deneb goading us on

ever further like spurs of Spanish silver

just you and me, my blood brother, my sister, together

in the vastness of a mutual solitude.

My God, when I think of the flights we’ve taken.

When I think of the things we’ve seen,

and the orchards of sorrow that found more bliss

in the fruit than they did in the blossom.

And what did we ever write about all those stars

that didn’t declare how impossibly illiterate we are

compared to the lyrics of light and time and wonder

they’ve been singing all these lightyears

since I first opened my eyes to why I’m conceivably here,

though here can be anywhere by now like a bird

that loses its bearing under the stars everytime

it tries to get a fix on where it’s going like a photon

jumping orbitals like tree rings in a flash of insight.

When you’re light, when you’re foolhardily alive

you don’t need to pay heed to where you’re going

because there isn’t a single stage, place, or phase

that isn’t the destination of what you’re shining up at.

And I never thought the day would ever come

when sadness would sweeten into wisdom enough

to take pity on the mirrors like the eyes under our lifemasks

when we went down to the river to drink

our own reflections like faces from the lifeboat of our hands,

like a rain of mercy far out at sea far from the sight of land,

when we first began to understand how clarity like unity

can be broken down into little pieces of sand

that reflect the whole universe as readily

in their mystic particularity

as the stars and the sun and the moon do

when they lay their swords and feathers

and flying carpets like wavelengths of light

down in tribute to our third eye weeping its way to the sea.

And you were surprised, admit it, weren’t you,

to find so many white horses like you running ashore,

mustangs from the waves, to check out the new guy’s wings.

And me standing there like an avalanche of winged heels

wondering why I didn’t make as big a splash

and if all we walked away with was a detailed starmap

who could say the journey really wasn’t worth it?

Let the shore-huggers do what they want with it

to find their way around in the dark like fireflies.

Leave it to them. We were ever explorers

from the beginningless beginning to the endless end,

and we’ll rise up again on a gust of stars

caught up like a dust-devil at the crossroads of earth

and ascend on a thermal of the sun, the stairwell

of a star-studded chromosome that could

take a coil of flypaper and turn it into a poem.

Joan McNerney Rendezvous

That was the name of a paint can from J&M Hardware. With sweat lingering on her face, she colored her room. Tinted now like insides of ripe plums, like perfect grapes. When the sizzling lemon sun dropped from heaven...night became moist and black. Her fan whirled thick air stained with cigarettes coffee, turpentine, white wine. She sank into her wicker couch as fog horns trail the horizon. Lotus screech relentlessly for water always wanting more more more water. Closing her eyes, remembering him now tasting the feast of his smile.

Scarves I want to make scarves from the sky. Since I’m not much of a seamstress, here’s hoping it won’t be too hard. To start I’ll just pick up a fleecy white cloud to cover my neck. Maybe create a dove grey scarf and cut out pale blue ones too. Make entire closets full of them. At sunset I will fashion boas of bright ruby and tangerine. My midnight shawl will be long gleaming ebony covering my shoulders keeping me warm. If lucky I’ll find some rainbows… kaleidoscopes to wrap up in. I will list them on eBay and Craig’s, hang pictures on my Facebook wall. Imagine, everybody will want them! Would you like one too? Better put your order in now.

Invitation Would you like to unwind an afternoon at the lake? Solar sparks spilling over us in showers of golden sizzle. Put on short shorts, skimpy tops, stick our toes into oozy mud. Breezes will shake treetops while we listen to birdsongs. Why not float on new grass facing an Alice blue sky? Read celestial comic strips from mounds of clouds. We can count sunbeams, chase yellow butterflies. Devour bowls of cherries painting our lips crimson. This noontime is perfumed with illions of wild flowers. Let’s go away all day...be embraced by the goddess.

Birthday Present I wanted to bring back the best gift from the country for you, just for you. I wanted to. Some sky would be nice, lots of lovely sky with light fleecy clouds. So I rushed through stores and bought the biggest shiny box and looked for a perfect bow. All shades of blue, violet with red and yellow. An entire rainbow of colored ribbons for the box to put this sky into. Then on the bus my bow fell apart. Somebody stepped on the box. It's all crushed and dirty. By the time we got to the city it was late. Did my sky fly away? The box is empty now. I wanted to bring back the best gift from the country for you, just for you. I wanted to.

A.J. Huffman

In Butterflied Dance

Invisible strings light the night. Electric. Circles, you lead. Me, nowhere falling over/under/into windows of whispered wishes. Something blows. Don’t breathe backwards in a dream . . . [w]hole worlds flicker faulter flutterdie.

Old McDonald’s Algorithm An automatic cow institutes a spark like a semicolon. Halfway to useless (but not quite), the trust increases with company. An absurd energizer elects an awful designation [for safety]: critical navigation inside a milk-carton canyon.

With Mental chalk I trace outline of where my body will lie. I imagine the scene, stark tragedy, me, bloodless against lazy accumulation of ink. Wells of unwritten will have consumed my conscious, leaving only a paper trail of mind’s relics for the authorities to pick, parts scavenged from earth and truth.

Dream Weaver I paint darkness through your mind with a whisper ed kiss. Hints of fang hang from that moment. Dripping [lip] stick and something darker. Stains. The wind at my touch. You tremble. The inconstant sides (in and out) of our circle shimmer and shift. Iridescent skin. Untouchable. Unwavering. Un . . . wait. Make a wish and . . . Pop!

John W. Sexton

With Every Atom

the pond princess …

by frogspawn light

you’ll find her

the porcelain sky

is white ... blue swallows penetrate

a slice of heart

with every atom

of its being ... Plutonium

loved her to bits

a disquiet of green

goes through him ... the ghost

of the mown lawn

his shoes of water

lost in the sea ... many

walk in them unbeknownst

nothing on the afraidio ...

Nanna Voompyre

knits a rock

our ears cocked ...

the hundred and one damnations

of Lucifer’s poodle

the translucent palace ...

an abstract emperor

puts thoughts in our minds

the invisible lift ...

we arrive

at the heard floor

Eternity is Never Done

he dials “angels”

on the Otherbox ... a goldfish

forms in her bladder

never saw us coming ...

a glass car shatters

the light barrier

a soft invasion ...

the treacle robots

just poured themselves in

eternity is never done ...

in her grey mousecoat

she dusts the moon

polishing the crooked shoe ...

an odour of Stilton

grants three wishes

mind-snails enter

by spiral ladder ... something niggles

the bad conscience

a whale breathes us in ...

night in the sea

is deep

Face of Bloody Ruby

twilight, the pines

heavy as waves ... cyclopic

owls hunt ribbons of dream

blue-black Martian night …

stone-pence sift ice crystals

from sand

a phlumphing wakes us …

spermy luminescence

surrounds the mothgirls

x-twins a hard labour

teleporting in and out

of mother

thinkship docks

in brainware ... another idea

has traversed the stars

forest bright silver …

specks falling from the moon's eyes

all night long

cancerentity

spills through the bloodstream

my name is Lesion

fleshroom farm …

cuttings from the vampyres

burgeon in the loam

full hair of quartz,

a face of bloody ruby ... sunlight

through her cold heart

Loose Floorboard

six-tongued

lisping snake

xis xis xis

red red

thy irkish delight

candied humans

peeling the shadow

of a cat …

the New Origami begins

a low fume …

silent the slammed doors

of the mercury car

Carnival of Low …

three goldfish souls

in a polythene bag

methanes of Titan

pure intellect …

one whiff and you’re theirs

a loose floorboard …

Uncle Will-he-not

shows us his hidden mind

Martin Burke RUT TRACKS

And Breugel painting rut-tracks and harvest And Ensor’s clowns entering Brussels with Christ And three barges led by the barge named Galilee

And that shadow crossing mine on the towpath walk

And Breugel painting the blind leading the blind

And the delicate lines of Permeke

And the over-hanging branch becoming knotted in the ivy

And the word that sends a poems trotting towards its conclusion

(But a poem has no conclusion, only a pause) And the blue sky of March

And Breugel painting the procession to Calvary

And the weight of the wood on human shoulders

And water too precious to spill And the hesitation before you go on

And then the going on

On the rut-tracks and song-lines of Flanders

*

There was and there is

The past and the present Water flowing in several directions

Though it flows from the self-same source. Which is how memory works –

Bedding down and branching out To touch the extraordinary

It calls up to embrace; Which is not to say that everything is understood

It isn’t, but what does that matter

As water brings with it Fresh details of the annunciation –

Something which if not fully understood

Is at least subscribed to.

*

There are no names for places such as this –

Flatlands embracing fields embracing the sea

Each holding itself apart yet joining the other under the same sky –ruffled, grey, but not threatening. But there is more

Roads meet and join to pose a proposition Kant would understand

Who proposed such moments as dynamic or mathematical –

His definition of the sublime you need no nothing about as you experience it at the crossroads which cancel the question it raises. Whatever is asked can be answered but need not be

So will we walk with ruler and compass or stand at the joining absorbed into that landscape of flatland, field and sea where the world it what it is –

Vivid beyond definition

A shimmering which holds?

*

Gent: St Baaf’s, a March afternoon gone suddenly spring

Gent: the Patershol, the Vrijdagmarkt, the Kouter The Nederkouter, the Korenmarkt, the St Michiel’s helling

The tree towers, the river, the quay, the poem written on stone

The lovers, the revelers, the afternoon strollers

The sense of expectation and achievement The dialogue of the city with time, the reaching into time, the reaching beyond time

A clock striking three, a girl on a bicycle, a shadow-lit lane saying welcome The word I make in reply.

*

Ghosts return to where the living wait For their arrival under the cherry tree

And shadows meander across the grass

And leaves flicker to the world

And the quiet afternoon makes you suspect Something silent is being said

Where ghosts return and the living wait Between the not said and the said

Nourishing the living and the dead. So why should I force a memory out with a sigh

Why force anything more than the rate it travels at To arrive where I am patient or fidgety?

Across the grass the shadows move and nothing stops at those borders

*

The straight line of a slanting shadow on the Stadhuis gavel divides the world

There is the world of light and the world of absence

Walk between them

Balance on the balls of your feet Give one word to your heart and one word to your mind

Take note of the fecund dialogue

Call it the yeast of spring

Shape your life about it

*

The precedents came upon us

Some were vibrant, some were not Some were like beautiful women and some were like three sisters dressed in black

Some were ships with an eye on the prow

Others has black sails. Then someone spoke of tradition and someone disagreed

Someone spoke of rights and someone spoke of rites

And the discussion went on as it has always gone on

And you felt yourself back in Antwerp when the humanist flower rooted

Because someone said yes and someone said no when they were both saying the same thing.

*

August Storm-prophets came, storm-prophets went However, if you asked a signal of the signal-man…

Yet these stones imply the dead continue a life within my life Who in the guise of birds come to my garden table

Save this and the world will not perish

Ignore it and it dies.

*

To make a painting is to make love to the wind

Is to make of circumstance an occasion of grace

To say to the future that the present exists

So as the wind curls in from the coast I see that nothing changes and nothing will –

It is always the light which astounds us. *

Sea bird I do not know the name of Their brightness essential, defining

Equaling the rightness of evening

Into which these lines are taken

For their sake and mine

For the little of beauty that I know

For boats with names

Expressive of Island and Faros

Towards which they will soon be headed.

*

Essay the river and essay the docks, the dock-workers

The goods of merchants stocked in containers

The cranes and lifts, the pulley wires and ropes

Say something about this, place it in a time-frame

Decry what’s lost but love what remains

See the river continue beyond the bend you cannot see beyond.

*

History happens

Arriving like a messenger reluctant to give up its message

We’d make a bargain –our shadow for its, its word for ours

The message carried forward Which is how Vondel’s breath happens - A breath from a mouth given to a mouth, inhaled, exhaled

Never withheld, never repeating itself or reaching exhaustion.

*

Perfection of the seemingly unintended –

The spiders’ web I am reluctant to disturb

*

The way things change

Become themselves, become something else

Restless time, serene timelessness

River and towpath, cloud and shadow

Morning into evening into morning again

A hand on a page and then a new page

Becoming something else so as to be what it always was.

*

And I think of them, the beguines, Those soft footed women in their cobbled enclosures, Their ardent prayers, their calm assurance, The sense of that which is holy being tangible to them, Who called themselves to their vocation Much as a poet or a mason would –

Addressing the stone, freeing the stone, Then returning to the silence of the workplace As if everything and nothing had happened.

*

These are the rooms Hans Memling painted These are the words borrowed from Vondel This is the snow and this is the light And this is Ensor’s parade. These are the rooms and these are the words And the world is the same but other: Light on leaves turns the world green and brown

The world is green and brown.

*

It is enough –

Water fills the jug Hands have clay enough to mould a world

Memories take on a life of their own It is enough Nothing else is needed Clay moulds the hands which think to mould the clay.

*

Rut tracks leading to ten Ede show me the life I (must) lead

Roman James Hoffmann

The Lord of the Desert

Adorned

with the barren touch of desert winds,

which tear the blue down from the sky,

the dragon roars

through the naked night

disciples of the day despise.

Abhorred,

the fallen stars

illuminate

and lay waste the lines of paradise.

Standing over fields of ash

watered with ravaged women’s weeps,

they pledge cracked lips

to countless condemned kisses.

Under weight of raining flame

and execration

old affections lie collapsed;

baptised with stains

disgust

and fear.

He Sees the Name

your Name against Mine

fought under December skies

will

and breath

burn

in hearts, pounding

calling for blood.

unafraid of fire we stand

victorious

over the father

in his empire of ash

a rapt gallery of memories applaud

the triumphant

adversary

A photo

On the beach

the backdrop: a dune,

the sky faded grey by the abandonment

of being buried in boxes,

in cupboards,

and in attics,

…these purgatories where our memories mildew

my older sister

a baby

essays a resplendent cherubic smile

safe by the side

of my mother

whose protective arm props up her pose

their silenced explosions

echoing

the corruption of agony into innocence:

my mother’s fragile happiness

as the pain no-one will know

gives birth to beauty

and light finally escapes

her eye-lined

black-holes.

The Sun behind the smog

What do we owe,

for the confidence of the Gods?

…for the admission to a substitute Heaven,

dimly lit from behind an ignored Tragedy

by a lost Sephira?

I forget:

what was the price we agreed to pay

to purchase the fascination of our fathers?

…and how desperate were these dreams

that defiled themselves so readily,

that so eagerly cut the Sun down from the sky,

traded the sacred for the commonplace,

and made us tire of looking Angels in the eye?

Tasting the Wasted (To Those that Beat God)

With my fingers I rummaged

through the shit of generations;

buried alive in the body of a boy

I picked through digested ideas

and tasted the wasted souls

that filled the ground above me

with their bankrupt beliefs.

Patiently my fingers wandered

through generations of misspent familial faith,

my nails bruised and swollen

from the soil and excrement lodged under them.

I wept; and I mourned the ugly trajectory of my tears.

Broken, I conceived of such audacious heresies,

and with diabolic intent I stole the design of men

and with divine measures set out to

transmute my agony into unimaginable ecstasy.

No Grace was to account for the

eventual crowning of my Promethean glory.

Instead through infernal fortune

my soul was forged in flames and

was born strong as Sin.

After spending many moons on fruitless alchemical endeavour,

I at last distilled the essence of the Sun,

which on a morning whose memories escape me,

I drank.

My body burned, and my skin flew away from my bones in flakes

like a grotesque snow

…but my cries birthed celebrations,

jubilant and victorious,

that increased in volume as the boy I knew flew away like litter

and my soul, forever thought of as fugitive,

with blinking eyes met the world

and christened it with laughter at all the love to be seen.

.

Carolyn Gregory

STAR UNDER STROBES

Thinner than thin and swathed in white like a crescent moon made flesh, she strolls on designer heels, only her stiff resolve propping her up, a quiet doll. Fêted as a luminous beauty, her collarbone prominent above strapped breasts, it's hard to imagine her feeding her children as she takes the arm of the limo escort, tottering among stars. The cameras flash like strobes around her huge long lashed eyes, her silence now glacial. She is thin enough to be begging for alms somewhere else, her lips a red wound hiding her screams.

CABIN FRAMED IN ICE

Ghosts walked down the narrow hall in single file draped in gray suits One carried a brass key with scripted plate scrolled with "The Jane" A century ago, they had watched the ship sink, its lifeboats and chandeliers filling with ice The ghost with the key beckoned me into a room, small as a steward's cabin All night I drifted among ice floes, my small mattress a life raft into my dreams

AMONG FLOWERS I left my room, walking among the stunning purple lilacs. Rain poured gently over dogwoods and green near the nursing homes. Inside the walls, I could hear muffled breathing on Mother's Day when some receive tulips and others lie alone, listening to the rain.

CHIHULY (for the False and the Real) Pushing the high ceiling, the green tree of icicles was not fabulous as she had expected from all the hyperbole expanding notions of glass and artifact, turning color on its ear with red, green, yellow in the same giddy room of tentacles and manta rays. Of course, the children were happy, looking up at glass disks melting overhead. Tourists snapped shots for their grandchildren, climbing stairs into the new wing. The only room drawing awe was the one with bowls. Inspired by baskets, they were pale tan and yellow, their edges folded as if water rolled over clay left to shine in the dark.

RETRO POLITICS

If he were president, he'd bring back the guillotine for stealing bread or sedition. Traitors would fill jails next to thieves and immigrants, half of Hollywood would feel the axe along with budgets and the ones who worked until they died.

THE BLUE DRESS The dress was buried in a captain's chest in the basement beneath a fox stole, tail in its mouth, keepsake of a magical world. During the war, my mother danced at the Stage Door Canteen, her red lips perfect above an orchid, her light step accompanying each partner. Ostrich feathers plumed the neck over layers of pale skirt, rising and falling. Dress for a princess in paradise. I wore it when I was seven, doing a can-can for the kids in my neighborhood, wrote my own script for the dancehall girl I pretended to be showing off my fancy steps.

ENDANGERED

One late night, I turned into Ceabook Cylityy in cyberspace, threatened by goblins. Some hacker tapped into my electric pipeline, threatening me with extinction. Would I go the way of the Dodo, forced to plod along a lonely beach to nowhere? The hacker said I violated policies, warned that I could lose my account full of family photos, poems and notes from friends. I fought back! Checked my face in the mirror several times and fired my keyboard into space.

Patrick White POETRY USED TO LIVE IN A FORBIDDEN STATE OF COURAGEOUS GRACE

Poetry used to live in a forbidden state of courageous grace

but now it’s palpably culpable of cowardice.

Paper-mache lifemasks with all the characteristics

of a gaping sin of omission. As F.R. Scott said of E.J. Pratt

in his poem about the building of the CPR

where are the coolies in your poem, Ned?

The ten thousand that died lining and tamping track.

Now the real subject matter of most works of art

is not what was put in, but what was left out,

where’s the heart, the soul, the imagination,

where’s the grief and the longing that slowly matured

into the black flames of the charred roses

that immolated themselves in their own fires

for the love of someone they couldn’t live without

like the other wing of the song of a bird

maimed by the oversight like a tree in chains.

The applause of trained seals isn’t praise

and celebrity isn’t fame. Everyone’s good

at divining the well, but who takes the time

to dig one any deeper than their own shallow grave?

Maybe there’s a sleeper out there who’s fighting

for his life in a dream, enduring excruciating transformations

as experience shapeshifts his voice into poems

we’ll get to overhear one day after he’s dead

like the sound of distant water in a mindstream

or the ashes of an unknown soldier

that couldn’t be contained by a broken urn

or buried under a monument to anonymous violence.

A hero or a heroine who didn’t play to the crowd

like an acrobat of words faking it as a wizard

in a literary scene of very unsacred clowns.

Tiger-striped arsonists that couldn’t burn

their way through a matchbook. Where are

the thieves of fire, the Promethean criminals,

the fore-ordained demons of nihilistic doom,

the mad who used to sacrifice their shadows

on the altars of the mountains of the moon

and came down into the valleys in tears

with a message like an avalanche of the underwhelmed?

Are there no more Druids? Is the bloom off the mistletoe

of myriad moons that have lost their atmosphere

to the bright vacancy of the vacuum on the reflected side of things

and forgotten the dark abundance of the occult originality

of the true face that’s turned away like a perennial eclipse

of the black sheep of a severely depleted family

that doesn’t want to talk about such things in public?

No more shamans risking death in the cradles of the treetops

at the hands of the visions that cut them to the bone

to see if they’ve marrowed suffering into lunar gold

they scatter on the waters like feathers and bread?

Even the deer miss their hunting magic more than they realized.

Now the flies stalk lions in zoos that know better

than to fight back. And poetry reads like a tourist trap

for expired prophets glad-handing their coveted awards.

Bleed a bit, damn it. Weep like a mountain. Write a poem

like an amputee in a straitjacket with the pen in your mouth.

Pour the ocean into a seabed, not a teacup

that tastes vaguely of life, and down a deep draft

of your own blood in a single gulp from the vessel of your skull,

then wipe it from your lips like the petals of a rose

that knows how the heart feels when it’s sealed

like a blood bank and the hungry ghosts of ideas and ideals

have been summoned to it like a seance of vampires in lieu

of the living metaphors that animate the lives of real things.

I’m not saying that the morning is without singers,

or that one should only listen to the night birds

or that the old stumps aren’t sprouting tender green branches

out of their Medusa-headed roots. There’s fire

in every generation if you get close enough to it

sufficient to singe your eyebrows on or at least

walk toward on a cold night in a cruel landscape

to spread a few stories around to scare the children

into listening to their imagination unbound

from the usual lullabies that keep their parents lyrically young

in a state of arrested development. Where are

the dangerously dissociated ones who yell Merd!

at the choirs of cant and stab an established

pigeon of a poet through the hand like an osprey

then walk off the stage into oblivion as if

a mediocre morality play were beneath his felonious dignity?

Where are the black-robed, outlaw, poet priests,

the sybils, oracles, witches and warlocks,

the vatic rebels hiding out in caves to amplify their voice

like the anarchic mountain they’re trying to bring down

on everybody’s heads like a meteoric shower

of portentous space junk in a degenerating orbit

that cremated their body parts separately as if each

had nothing in common with its fellow asteroids

except they couldn’t keep their cornerstones together long enough

to establish a small planet they could live on in anarchic accord.

I can remember when poems were written in blood,

not bleach and fabric softeners. Not anti-bacterial detergents

that shoot at their own troops over the heads of the enemy.

And how the poetic toads that hibernated for seven years

in the dry creek beds suddenly woke up one day to a flash flood

and started singing sexually naked in the downpouring rain,

not these isolated ripples and trickles of acidic dewdrops

that burn the tongues of the flowers with trademarks and name brands.

Where the savage mystic who wanders in out of the desert

reeking of stars and the wisdom of a snakepit

that could make a whole village stop work, and listen

to the unexpurgated desert wind that spoke through him?

Where are those who ennobled the miseries of life

by living their way through them like diamonds in a black lung?

Now it’s the association of the sensibilities into elitist cliques

of enculturated memes with homogeneous life themes

that never leave home to save their children, as Rilke rightly observes,

from having to do it for them. Domesticated lapdogs

never very far from the begging bowls that feed them

like the awards and grants of an institutionalized paternalism

that lets them know when the silver-tongued should be heard

at the table, each in their proper place, and when

Skinnerian censorship, like repressive tolerance, is golden.

Poetry’s as old and as dead an art as prostitution.

It’s been dying since the first shaman

imitated the song of a bird with its feathers on fire

or the first stripper teased her nakedness with boas.

Or the first wounded wolf let out a warcry

that chilled the moon with its unwaning sincerity.

And the ultimate angle? To be the thing itself

until it breathes you in and out like a way of life

the petty won’t risk aspiring to for fear of falling

and being found out like a candling parachute

tangled in its own life lines like a labyrinth of axons

that have lost their nerve for heights. Twenty-five million

children dying of starvation every year on the planet

and you’re lying in the lap of the luxury of literature

writing about the rustic quaintness of making home-made jam,

the same way they turned totem-poles into telephone booths

and minor domestic tragedies into recyclable myths of origin.

Let the stars burn deeper into you. Befriend the darkness

like the largest room in your house. Salt your tears

with oceans where your sorrows can learn

to swim like fish without ever swimming out of your eyes.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is it, this onceness,

of the dirge and the lyric you’re never going to hear

the same way twice, this mystic specificity

that encompasses us wholly in the mystery

of what we’re doing here, what we’re saying

and thinking and feeling and shrieking and seeing here

in the presence of each other bearing witness everywhere

as if even the void we flash out of like the morning dew

and return to with the dust of the sunset all over us

were also in some inconceivable way, though

we can’t put our lips to its eyelids, sentient

and playfully absurd, but never frivolously recognized.

Don’t live like the dress rehearsal of a play you didn’t write.

In the pursuit of an earthly excellence that expresses

our human consternation of who we are and are not,

neither this, nor that, say deeply what you mean

so that we can all draw water from it like the sun.

So there’s lightning in the clouds of your depression

and the fireflies take over where the starmaps leave off.

Be a great high priestess of the sacred syllable

and when you enter your venerated groves

like the night wind among the crowns of the trees

be at least as engaging and beautiful as they are

and as at home among warriors as you are homeless among saints.

Awake and alert in the unsayable silence. Wait.

And the metaphors will come like bridges that burn

and go up in flames like an orchid and bridges

that collapse under their own weight into the river

they were trying to cross to the colder, lonelier shore

where purity’s just a long, slow annihilation

of everything you still insist upon cherishing.

Let go. Fall. Revive. Return. Go up the mountain.

Find the mother lode. Bring it back down into the valley

like a strong river brings its knowledge of gold within.

Behind every explorer is a child who likes to discover

and share things. So what’s worth finding that you can’t?

You just have to look into one eye to see the history

of everything that can be seen. And when you open your mouth

prompted by a rush of stars, you sing

for thousands of dead poets who used to occupy

these green boughs and leafless branches, you sing

as if you were the last surviving member of the choir,

and the silence, the enraptured silence, were listening.

All selections are copyrighted by their respective authors. Any

reproduction of

these poems, without the express written permission of the authors, is

prohibited.

YGDRASIL: A Journal of the Poetic Arts - Copyright (c) 1993 - 2013 by

Klaus J. Gerken.

The official version of this magazine is available on Ygdrasil's

World-Wide Web site http://www.synapse.net/kgerken. No other

version shall be deemed "authorized" unless downloaded from there.

Distribution is allowed and encouraged as long as the issue is

unchanged.

COMMENTS & SUBMISSIONS

Submission and comments should be sent to Klaus Gerken, Chief Editor

at kgerken@synapse.net

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